Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won't seek reelection, ending chances of a 3-way Arizona Senate race

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Ending more than a year of speculation about her future, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Tuesday she won’t seek reelection because extremism in both major parties makes it impossible to tackle the nation’s needs.

In a video message on social media, Sinema, I-Ariz., rattled off what she views as a successful legislative record and lamented that “Americans still choose to retreat further to their partisan corners.”

"It’s all or nothing. The outcome is less important than beating the other guy,” she said. “The only political victories that matter these days are symbolic. … Compromise is a dirty word. We’ve arrived at that crossroad and we chose anger and division. I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now.”

It brings an anticlimactic end to a career that began on the far left and became defined for a centrism that alienated her former political base.

It was part of a transformation that began in 2018 when she won her Senate seat casting herself as someone who spent years as a child living at an abandoned gas station without indoor plumbing. She leaves office with multiple pending ethics complaints claiming indulgent campaign spending.

Operating as the independent she often claimed to be even in 2018, Sinema had several significant legislative triumphs that were offset by a voter base that wanted someone else.

Speaking in generalities that didn’t mention anyone by name, Sinema said it has grown harder to find partners in formulating bipartisan legislation for the good of the country.

She did not discuss or endorse those hoping to succeed her. They are: Ruben Gallego, the only prominent Democratic challenger; Kari Lake, the leading Republican contender; and Mark Lamb, who is also vying for the GOP nomination.

Sinema also gave no indication of what she plans to do after leaving office.

Her Senate seatmate, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., thanked Sinema for an "extraordinary career."

“Over our three years of serving together, I’ve had a front row seat to Senator Sinema’s work in the Senate and witnessed her tenacity as she forged compromises on issues that felt unsolvable," he said in a statement. "In a town where a lot of people are much happier talking about problems than doing anything to fix them, she’s pursued meaningful solutions, working with Republicans and Democrats to pass lasting legislation that makes a difference in the lives of Arizonans and all Americans.

“We’ve worked together to accomplish bipartisan legislation on infrastructure, marriage equality, gun safety, and more that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for her being in that Senate seat."

Gallego similarly thanked her for her public service.

"As we look ahead, Arizona is at a crossroads. Protecting abortion access, tackling housing affordability, securing our water supply, defending our democracy — all of this and more is on the line," Gallego said in a written statement. "That’s why Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike are coming together and rejecting Kari Lake and her dangerous positions. I welcome all Arizonans, including Senator Sinema, to join me in that mission.”

Lake, a former newscaster in Phoenix, praised Sinema’s “courage” in a written statement that praised her on her exit.

“As a Journalist, I covered Kyrsten Sinema for many years,” Lake said. “We may not agree on everything, but I know she shares my love for Arizona.

“Senator Sinema had the courage to stand tall against the Far-Left in defense of the filibuster—despite the overwhelming pressure from the radicals in her party like Ruben Gallego who called on her to burn it all down. … I wish Senator Sinema the best in her next chapter.”

In a statement, Lamb said her decision "isn't a surprise" and said it now focuses attention on the Republican alternative to Gallego in the Senate.

"Kyrsten Sinema's strength has always been in attracting the large number of independent voters in Arizona. We expect most of those independent voters to vote for Sheriff Mark Lamb in a general election."

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Sinema's exit "creates a unique opportunity for Republicans to build a lasting Senate majority this November.

"With recent polling showing Kyrsten Sinema pulling far more Republican voters than Democrat voters, her decision to retire improves Kari Lake’s opportunity to flip this seat," Daines said in a written statement.

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Sinema's critics on the left pounced on her announcement to again blast someone they viewed as a traitor to Democratic politics.

“Kyrsten Sinema will go down in history as a feckless, corrupt egomaniac who sabotaged abortion and voting rights and destroyed her own political career in the process,” said Leah Greenberg, the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. “Enjoy your lobbying gig and leave the rest of us alone forever.”

The Replace Sinema organization that may have been the most vocal opponents of Sinema also cheered her departure:

“We started this effort to Replace Sinema over two years ago to hold Sinema accountable for betraying the Arizonans who elected her. Sinema obstructed President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, got in the way of fundamental rights like abortion care and voting, and did the bidding of her wealthy donors who fund her luxury lifestyle. We succeeded in first pushing her out of the party — by making clear she couldn’t win a Democratic primary — and now we’ve also helped push her out of the Senate. Good. Arizonans deserve better.”

Sinema's decision comes just weeks after former President Donald Trump led the GOP resistance to a bipartisan border security bill that she negotiated for months. Republican senators thwarted her bill by using the legislative filibuster that Sinema long defended over the complaints of her Democratic supporters.

But her political fate seemed clear long before what may have been her final significant legislative effort. She was far back in the polls, her fundraising had evaporated, she didn’t gear up for a statewide campaign operation and didn’t interact with the public whose votes she needed.

While she assigned equal blame to Democrats and Republicans for the gridlock in Washington that led her to quit after 12 years in Congress, Sinema faced stiff headwinds for a reelection campaign she never really embraced.

With Sinema formally out, Arizona won’t have a three-way U.S. Senate race with an incumbent independent that appears unprecedented in the nation’s history. Instead, the state is on track for a race in which both major party nominees seem destined to claim the other side is committed to an extremist.

Sinema’s public announcement came just ahead of the April 1 deadline to submit more than 42,000 signatures to qualify for the November ballot. As the calendar slipped away, her campaign’s silence about her plans made clear she wasn’t running even if Sinema did not publicly acknowledge it.

Long before the border security bill died and the signature deadline approached, Sinema regularly fell more than 10 percentage points behind those challenging for her seat, according to polls from the left and the right.

Her fundraising has skidded since she left the Democratic Party in December 2022, suggesting her cash advantage was unlikely to last much longer.

Her underfunded campaign didn’t meet its own benchmarks for conducting polling and it operated with a smaller paid staff than Kelly, who won’t face voters for another four years.

Sinema arrived in the Senate after three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and eight years in the Arizona Legislature.

Her narrow 2018 victory over Republican Martha McSally snapped a 30-year elective drought for Arizona Democrats and correctly cemented a belief in her then-party that they could win in the long-red state.

During her tenure, Sinema rarely faced reporters and never held a live town hall event, contributing to a reputation for aloofness among her one-time supporters.

Former three-term Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., who supported Sinema during her 2018 campaign and quickly backed Gallego, said he couldn’t talk to Sinema once she took office.

Despite saying bipartisan work had become too elusive, Sinema will leave the Senate with several significant legislative victories, such as a trillion-dollar national infrastructure law and the biggest changes to gun laws in three decades.

In 2021, Sinema put together a bipartisan coalition to pass the infrastructure law after direct negotiations with a Republican senator and the Biden White House reached an impasse.

Throughout former President Donald Trump’s four years in office, infrastructure was widely seen as an area of bipartisan agreement that led to no legislation because of disagreements over how to pay for the needed projects.

Sinema, working with then-Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, managed to bypass the usual political minefield and get a deal signed into law.

About six months later, Sinema was again at the center of a bipartisan deal to provide greater scrutiny to gun purchases involving younger adults and potential funding for mental health services as well. It happened after the gun massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 students and two teachers and wounded 17 others.

That deal brought together Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., one of the most prominent gun-control advocates in Congress, and Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who are vocal gun rights advocates.

A broader bipartisan group of senators involving Kelly ensured enough votes to pass a measure that stands as the most significant legislation restricting gun sales since the 1994 crime bill.

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Sinema tried to replicate those triumphs with a border security bill involving Murphy and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla.

That bill, which focused primarily on security provisions, not immigration changes, collapsed even before they released its details when Trump instructed Republicans not to give Biden an election-year victory.

Sinema’s willingness to immerse herself in thorny policy debates competed for attention with a penchant for starring in viral imagery that seemed to depict a woman battling her base.

In March 2021, Sinema memorably did a curtsy while delivering a thumbs down on a provision to raise the federal minimum wage with a coronavirus relief bill.

Her office said she dipped her knee to acknowledge the grateful Senate staffers whom she rewarded with cake after a marathon session of work. Voting by thumb happens all the time but rarely is noticed.

But to Sinema’s critics, the moment crystallized a cruel indifference to the nation’s lowest-paid workers, many of whom kept the economy afloat during the worst of the pandemic.

Weeks later, Sinema had a social media post that showed her sipping sangria wearing pink glasses, a pink newsboy hat and a ring with the words “f--- off.”

Sinema didn’t say the message applied to anyone in particular, but in a revealing show of an already-evident split, many of her former supporters saw it as aimed at them.

In September 2021, a group including a former Sinema campaign staffer, formed a political action committee to encourage and support a primary challenger for Sinema.

A month later, immigration reform activists confronted Sinema in a videotaped incident that further corroded her image with the left.

It happened inside a building at Arizona State University, where Sinema has taught for years. They urged her to support President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, but Sinema walked into a bathroom with little engagement.

“We knocked on doors for you to get you elected,” one of the activists said as Sinema retreated to a bathroom stall.

The incident led to a police investigation that recommended criminal charges against the activists.

In hindsight, her decision to back the filibuster over passing a voting rights bill in January 2022 may have marked the political point of no return for Sinema.

It came after Arizona Republicans in the state Senate ordered a partisan and amateurish review of presidential ballots from Maricopa County that lasted about nine months. It sought to undermine Democratic victories in Arizona and transformed the state into a hotbed of election conspiracies.

In Arizona, and across the nation, Republicans pushed state-level bills intended to make voting harder. Democrats in Congress pursued federal legislation to thwart the GOP efforts.

Biden met with Sinema and fellow holdout Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., in a bid to push a Democratic-led bill to the House of Representatives. Both remained opposed to changing the filibuster rule to allow a bill on voting rights to proceed.

At the time, Sinema said she backed the bill. Even so, she would not set aside the filibuster rule to do so, and the measure predictably died from a Republican blockade. Kelly’s willingness to set aside the filibuster while he was running for reelection drew a starker contrast.

Some activists participated in a hunger strike in an effort to force Sinema to change her position. The Arizona Democratic Party censured her weeks later. Emily’s List, a powerful fundraising organization for Democrats nationally, threatened to withhold its support for her.

Gallego also warned of political consequences.

“Any reservoir of goodwill that she had is gone,” he said at the time.

A few months later, in August 2022, Sinema forced her fellow Democrats to remove a provision raising $14 billion in higher taxes from very wealthy people such as hedge fund managers to gain her needed support to pass a $700 billion bill that effectively stood as the heart of the Biden domestic agenda.

By December 2022, two days after Democrats across the country reveled in the run-off victory for Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., that boosted the party’s Senate majority, Sinema dropped the bombshell announcement that she was quitting the party.

"I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” she wrote in an opinion piece announcing her move in The Arizona Republic.

A month later, Gallego entered the Democratic race for Sinema’s seat. It led to a quiet détente with Democrats in Washington, who wanted their party to hold their majority but who also needed Sinema’s help to pass bills and confirm Biden nominees.

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No sitting Democratic senators endorsed Gallego while Sinema’s fate remained unclear, but none endorsed her, either. By contrast, Lake, who has a primary opponent in Lamb, has already wrapped up most of the GOP leadership’s endorsement plus she has Trump’s backing.

Sinema’s political retirement left her future after the Senate unclear. She may have dropped a clue about her future to a friend and colleague who shared it in a book last year.

In a 2023 book about Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, written with his cooperation and his journals, Romney is said to have inquired about Sinema’s reelection chances. She “shrugged matter-of-factly.”

“I don’t care. I can go on any board I want to. I can be a college president. I can do anything,” she told Romney, according to the book, which is drawn from interviews with Romney, Sinema and his records.

“I saved the Senate filibuster by myself. I saved the Senate by myself. That’s good enough for me.”

Sinema’s decision to quit has parallels to that of her predecessor, former Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

In 2017, Flake abandoned his reelection campaign after his standing within the GOP plummeted amid repeated clashes with Trump.

There is also irony in Sinema’s departure.

Her early forays into elective politics failed because the one-time anti-war, Green Party member who backed insurgent presidential candidate Ralph Nader was seen as too liberal. Her career ends, at least for now, when her former base sees her as too conservative.

Sinema’s move simplifies the electoral algebra in the race for her seat from a three-way contest with no recent comparison to a more traditional clash between a Democrat and a Republican.

Gallego, a five-term member of Congress, has no prominent opponent for the Democratic nomination. Lake, a former gubernatorial nominee and TV broadcaster, and Lamb are vying for the GOP nomination.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema will not seek reelection